This muddled black comedy of Brit mores and manners
and the
class
system is a mess, as it skewers the Britannia Hospital
as it celebrates
its 500th anniversary with the visit of the Queen
Mother and the
Japanese
ambassador to open the new Millar Centre for Advanced
Surgical
Science--partly
funded by Banzai Chemicals of Tokyo. It's a crude and
unfunny lampoon,
written by David Sherwin, that mocks the system, the
state of the
nation,
the Thatcher government, the unions, the political
protesters, the
strikers,
African dictators, privileged patients, both orthodox
and unorthodox
doctors,
the media, the Queen, the Brit public's blind
acceptance of royalty and
just about everything else conceivable. The
run-down-hospital gets the
once over by director Lindsay Anderson ("If"and ''O
Lucky Man!'' were
the
first legs of this trilogy), who fills it with his
cynicism and vulgar
Carry On wit. There are only stale jokes, obnoxious
characters, no
overall
viewpoint except for its smugness that it has
something important to
say,
and it remains loud and incoherent and not even up to
snuff to match
the
usual Hyde Park political soapbox orator.

The plot has the hospital's celebration upset by a
worker's
strike,
telecommunication problems and loud demonstrations on
the hospital
grounds
against the African dictator Ngami who is a privileged
private patient.
The harried, grimacing chief hospital administrator
Vincent Potter
bargains
to stop the strike with the oily union heads who are
willing to
sell-out
their members for personal gain (Joan Plowright, Dave
Atkins and Robin
Askwith), while ambitious investigative journalist
Mick Travis sneaks
into
the Millar wing with the latest in TV spyware to
broadcast to a van
parked
in front of the hospital. He stumbles upon a
refrigerated room of body
parts that are to be used in the Genesis demonstration
to be performed
by the unethical, pompous, glory-seeking researcher
Professor Millar,
and
he pays the ultimate price for trying to get a story.
Professor Millar
performs ghastly experiments with the refrigerated
corpses, as he makes
Frankenstein-like patchwork creations that result in
the new man--who
has
a human brain situated in a pyramid-shaped computer.
Things get out of
control as the mob rushes the building after learning
HRH has been
sneaked
inside, the police smash heads and it ends with madman
Professor Millar
delivering a hopelessly insane speech during his demo
about modern
civilization
being insane and beyond saving.

Though intense and wound up to give everyone the
business,
this attempt
at Swiftian satire wasn't too swift and couldn't
manage to clean up its
filthy act with anything conclusive but for a few
scatological sight
gag
moments and the embarrassingly crass humor of
targeting a dwarf and a
cross-dresser
to be its chief objects of derision.